On the Limits of Making Programming Easy

Publication:

Languages, Compilers, Analysis - From Beautiful Theory to Useful Practice: Essays Dedicated to Alan Mycroft on the Occasion of His Retirement

ISBN:

978-3-032-08187-2

Link:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-08187-2_11

Abstract:

A lot of programming research shares the same basic motivation: how can we make programming easier? Alas, this problem is difficult to tackle directly. Programming is a tangle of conceptual models, programming languages, user interfaces and more and we cannot advance all of these at the same time. Moreover, we have no good metric for measuring whether programming is easy. As a result, we usually give up on the original motivation and pursue narrow tractable research for which there is a rigorous methodology.

BibTeX:

@incollection{petricek_limits_2026,
    title = {{On the Limits of Making Programming Easy}},
    author = {Petricek, Tomas and Jakubovic, Joel},
    year = {2026},
    booktitle = {{Languages, Compilers, Analysis - From Beautiful Theory to Useful Practice: Essays Dedicated to Alan Mycroft on the Occasion of His Retirement}},
    editor = {Orchard, Dominic and Petricek, Tomas and Singer, Jeremy},
    publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
    location = {Cham},
    doi = {10.1007/978-3-032-08187-2_11},
    isbn = {978-3-032-08187-2},
    pages = {215--233},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-08187-2_11},
}

Book chapter